NaNoWriMo 2008 Update

For those who don’t remember or haven’t been paying attention, I’m participating in my third National Novel Writing Month right now. That’s when I consume massive amounts of chocolate and caffeine and write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days. After 20 days I’m over 34,000 words. That means I’m ahead of schedule, but not by much.

You can read along if you like, though I promise it’s full of typos, bad ideas, moralizing and inconsistencies (hey, it’s an unedited first draft).

Sci-Fi is Hard
This year has been much harder than previous years because I opted to write a sci-fi novel. That’s harder both because it’s a new genre for me, but also because that genre involves making up a lot of stuff. And the pressure cooker deadline of NaNoWriMo doesn’t give you a lot of room to spend time deciding things like how many years does it take for the evidence of civilization to deteriorate (though books like The World Without Us and this article help) or what kind of societies develop in a post-apocalyptic world. So you kind of have to wing it. Even describing simple things like appearance becomes a lot more complicated.

In the end, of course, it’s still just a story. And that’s what I’m trying to focus on. I can iron out those “details” later.

Breaking Routine
The other thing that’s making it harder this year it that we’re leaving for Thanksgiving five days early so we can attend a family funeral. Thanksgiving usually throws a wrench into the NaNoWriMo plans, but it’s usually only a few days of broken routine, and sometimes it can actually be helpful because you have a few days off. Nothing like pounding out a few thousand words while everyone else watches football or does their black Friday shopping.

But now that broken routine will stretch from three or four days to seven. We’ll have to see what happens. Certainly I have a worthy excuse to call it quits, but I’m not ready to throw in the towel yet. NaNoWriMo is about finishing no matter the odds.

I haven’t tried that, but I don’t think it’d work for me. It’d just create too much work retyping what I spoke, which would be too scattered to be very helpful.

I do find that drive time is incredibly good for thinking and I do start plotting out where things are going to go. I’m usually able to remember those general details well enough without writing them down or recording them.

Recent Reads

Story of an orphaned boy discovering his place in the galaxy. I liked the easy-going style, though it would have been helped by a more driving overall plot. The end literally gets weighed down in bureaucracy.

A little more academic and literary for my tastes (took me forever to figure out who the characters were since the narration kept switching back and forth), but it did offer an interesting perspective on African politics and culture.

A work-at-home dad wrestles with faith, social justice & story.

The personal site of Kevin D. Hendricks: 50% ideas I can’t get out of my head, 40% cool causes, projects and stories I want to share, and 10% stuff. Since 1998. Kevin is a writer and editor with his company, Monkey Outta Nowhere, in St. Paul, Minn.